Embodiments of the present invention relate to encryption technology, and more particularly, to methods and arrangements for handling encrypted messages that run on sensitive systems and/or systems which process sensitive data.
Supporting software solutions that run on sensitive systems and/or systems that process sensitive data can be a challenge. In addition to the general issues involved in any troubleshooting or debugging project, issues arise regarding how to handle the sensitive data so that it is not improperly exposed.
When a company with a sensitive system and/or a system that processes sensitive data suffers a major problem, the support teams from an internal information technology (“IT”) help desk or from an outside service provider in the troubleshooting business (collectively, “service provider”) often wish to see as much data as possible in the way of logs, crash dumps, memory dumps, etc., in order to best debug and troubleshoot the issue and come up with a patch or fix. The remedial process is often started by submitting a problem ticket/service request to the service provider. While much of the text or other information embedded inside the problem ticket/service request is of a benign nature and is in fact needed to solve the problem, there are exceptions. For example, when health care data, financial data or other sensitive information (collectively, “SI”) are involved, some of this information may make it into the problem ticket/service request as part of the submitter's effort to give as much information as possible to those trying to fix the problem. The IT staff at the service provider may therefore become exposed to sensitive information, which can be highly undesirable.
The owner of the sensitive systems/sensitive data, for example, hospitals in the health care domain, wish to minimize the exposure of sensitive data and information stored in these systems for both legal and practical considerations. A common example of this situation would be encountered when it involves a system deployed at a hospital that contains Protected Health Information (“PHI”) covered by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (“HITECH Act”) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”), and when there is a crash in the electronic health record database. PHI is for the purposes herein deemed to include SI, in addition to Sensitive Patient/Person Information (“SPI”), Sensitive Client Information (“SCI”) and other like designations which may be used interchangeably herein.